USGIF GotGeoint BlogUSGIF promotes geospatial intelligence tradecraft and a stronger community of interest between government, industry, academia, professional organizations and individuals focused on the development and application of geospatial intelligence to address national security objectives.

Search

August 02, 2016

There are two advances in technology that are having almost as much impact on mapping our world and tracking the location of things in it as the introduction of the GPS. The development of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) in the 1980s and 1990s has made possible the mass production of micro inertial measurement units (IMU) comprised of a combination of accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers. These have enabled the smart phone which contains a range of sensors, typically an accelerometer, thermometer, gyroscope, pressure sensor, humidity sensor, light sensor, location sensor (GPS),and a magnetometer. The second major advance is fast structure-from-motion (SfM) algorithms. One of the first applications is simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology which was developed for autonomous vehicles. In 2012 GeoSLAM was developed which made it possible to solve a major spatial problem, accurately tracking the location of a person inside a building or in an obstructed environment such as a city. Recently SfM has been successfully applied to indoor mapping in the form of new professional-level products from Indoor Reality and Leica Geosystems (Pegasus Backpack).

It turns out that structure-from-motion technologies can also be used for on-site visualization of a virtual BIM design in a real urban context. At this year's Geo Business 2016 I had a chance to talk to Crispin Hoult about an augmented reality product called UrbanPlanAR his company Linknode is developing with SfM technology from Heriot-Watt University that is designed to do this on consumer handheld smart devices such as an iPad.

Background

For years researchers and technologists have been struggling with a major spatial challenge - accurately tracking the location of a person in an obstructed environment such as a city or inside a building in 6 dimensions, 3D location and 3D orientation. Stucture-from-motion solves this problem and enables you to track your position and your orientation in an obstructed environment where GNSS satellite signals are unavailable or unreliable. Typically input from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and LiDAR is used to construct in real-time a 3D map of the immediate environment including objects such as walls and other objects. As you move, the map is reconstructed and this is used to record your trajectory. The algorithm is robust and helps to addresses some of the problems, such as drift, that results from using just an accelerometer.

Indoor mapping products, such as those based on GeoSLAM, assume that you are working in an unknown environment. But what if you already have information about the environment in the form of GIS maps, point clouds, and other georeferenced information ? Tracking your location in a known environment using just a smart handheld device is the problem that Crispin Hoult and his company Linknode are addressing. The specific business opportunity he is targeting with this technology is on-site (in-field) augmented reality visualization of BIM designs for new buildings with a consumer smart handheld.

Technically SfM algorithms require multi-sensor input. The typical smart phone or tablet has many motion tracking MEMS devices built into it. If you are outside in an unobstructed environment, the GPS sensor can reliably report your location to within 5 or 10 meters. But when you enter an obstructed environment where you have reliable georeferenced information, you need an algorithm that uses the camera and the inertial navigation sensors in the handheld tablet to accurately track its location and orientation in real-time. Crispin has been working with Heriot-Watt university to "mobilize" an algorithm that does just this. Basically the algorithmuses “visual-inertial tracking” for the online tracking of the 3D position and 3D orientation of the tablet. This is supported by ‘prior’ learning of the visual and structural appearance of the environment through structure-from-motion (SFM).

Crispin, what is the business problem that UrbanPlanAR addresses ?

We are targeting UrbanPlanAR at on-site visualization using only a consumer smart handheld. We are making it possible for an architect, owner, or city planner to come to a site with a handheld tablet and in real-time overlay a BIM model showing the design for a new building in the context of the real world. This is an application of augmented reality. What you see on the tablet is the real world and into that we superimpose the BIM model. Our focus right now is to visualize the building design in its urban context - making it possible to walk around in the area and see the building from different viewpoints. We add value by providing more trusted, more contextual visualizations so people can make decisions and engage more with the planning process.

The alternative way of doing this is to create a completely virtual world (often referred to as black box), but then you have problems with resolution and realism. We have research carried out by the University of Glasgow that shows that by doing on-site visualization and not blackboxing it, it becomes more trustworthy and enables more engagement from stakeholders.

Another way to look at the business value of UrbanPlanAR is that it adds value to your BIM investment. Designers and contractors invest in BIM because it enables automated clash detection, material takeoff, quantity surveying, construction staging and many other applications. One of the important value-adds that hasn't been fully recognized is visualization. Our technology can be another strong reason for creating a BIM model in the first place. If you have already developed a BIM model, it adds value to your model. With our software you can take your BIM model, walk out to the proposed site and show all stakeholders - potential customers, city planners, city engineers, and nearby land and building owners what the proposed structure is going to look like on site, in a real world context.

How does this work, what do I need to do to make this augmented reality visualization of a building design ?

The first step is to choose the context. Unlike the traditional approach where we would choose a location from which we want to view the building design, with UrbanPlanAR we choose an area of interest, which could be a city square, for example. Then we collect georeferenced information about the area we have chosen. Currently we use imagery captured specifically for that viewpoint site, but this will soon allow other alternatives to be used, such as existing datasets, for example, a city model, LiDAR scan, oblique imagery, or satellite or overflight imagery.

The next step is to get the BIM model of the design from the architect. To do this we plug into BIM 360, which is the Autodesk data store for BIM models. For smaller projects we can take a model published directly from Revit.

At this point we have the context and we have the BIM model. Then we simply take the mobile device out into the field on a tripod or simply held in the hand, and UrbanPlanAR will use the context to work out exactly where it is and enable you to see in real-time your design within the real world – displaying the BIM model not only “onto”, but visually “within” existing reality.

Unlike Virtual Reality systems where there are cost and time limits to the digitization process, what you see in augmented reality is 3D, infinite resolution that all comes for free as the real world. What we are showing is a combination of real and virtual. As users stand at the site, they see exactly what is there plus the change. That's what adds to the trust - you are on-site, out in the field or the city square, walking around and showing stakeholders what is actually there with the superimposed virtual model. You can also record it so you can replay it back in the office. That real-world GIS-based augmented reality we call that GIality. Everything is georeferenced, everything is anchored in the real world. That is what links the virtual to the real world. You need to know where the virtual building is in real-world coordinates. The technical challenge is that you also need to know where the observer is and his/her orientation as he or she walks around the site.

Who do you foresee is the end user of UrbanPlanAR ?

I would say that the primary application is early stage project feasibility and development for a new building. It could be used by the architect or by the developer who is funding the architect. It could also be used as a sales tool at this stage.

The second stage is the planning stage. When you are looking at permitting you need the convince the city or town council, who are the custodians of the city. Typically landscape architects are hired to develop and present the environmental statement and impact of the project to the city planner. But we now live in a world where we no longer have to rely on consultants to convey information. Nowadays the developer may do this him or herself. The city or town planners may also be users - as validators of what has been presented. UrbanPlanAR broadens the breadth and depth of 3D information available about the project. It is also interactive in that the architect can make changes to the BIM model and synchronize that to the users. Another advantage is that the users can go out to the site at any time to inspect some detail of the design that they may have missed.

What we have found useful is to interactively display different surfaces or finishes, different building heights, and different models. Preconstruction changes are very easy to do. The architect goes away after getting feedback from stakeholders, creates a new or modified BIM model, uploads it the cloud, and then a user synchronizes with the store and takes it out to the site. By doing this at the feasibility stage, early on in the planning process, communities become more involved and don't see what is being presented as almost a fait accompli. You want them to leave feeling they are actively involved in the design process - then you get more buy-in and there is less likely to be an appeal during the construction stage.

Does the BIM model have to be a Revit model ?

We integrate with BIM 360 today and we are planning to support Bentley BIM. In addition Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is one of our supported file formats. But this is not yet equivalent to importing files directly from Revit or Bentley BIM, because exported IFC files from some BIM vendors do not support texture.

What types of hardware does your software run on ?

We support the iPad Pro and we are working on a Microsoft Surface port.

Does UrbanPlanAR require preprocessing in the cloud or on a desktop ?

Neither the BIM model nor the geoferenced context ends up being the operational model we need to do the localization, but both are valid inputs. All the input data including GIS context and Revit model is preprocessed on a desktop or in the cloud and then synchronized to the handheld.

Crispin, you already have a product that is designed for rural environments but also relies on augmented reality. Can you tell me about that ?

Yes it is called VentusAR, and it is designed to work in a rural environment. It has been targeted on visualizing wind farms and solar farms for land owners, communities and planners because these farms are very contentious issues. Before our our product became available, the standard methodology was to take photographs out in the field, go back to the office, process them on the desktop to incorporate the proposed wind or solar farm, send the resulting images to the printer and then show the picttures to the stakeholders. Because of the time and cost it tended to be done late in the planning process, which made it difficult to make changes.

Late last year for the first time we used VentusAR for visualizing transmission towers. And a few weeks ago we did our first modeling of transmission lines. As with UrbanPlanAR, VentusAR uses the tablet’s integrated camera, GPS position and 3D gaming capabilities to create an accurate, location-specific, realistic view of transmission tower models in context. You can investigate different scenarios with different stock models like towers, turbines, and panels. It works well in a rural environment because our georeferenced information about the real world is typically a digital terrain model. In a rural environment, if your GPS is out by 5 meters and you are looking at something a hundred meters away, it doesn't matter that much. In an urban environment where you need more precision and can't rely on GNSS, you need a more sophisticated approach, which is what we have done together with Heriot-Watt University for UrbanPlanAR.

The project is supported by Innovate UK, the United Kingdom’s innovation agency (Project 102040).

Underground utility mapping

Underground utility conflicts and relocations are the number one cause for project delays during road construction. In 2005 Hexagon acquired UK-based Cable Detection. Since then Leica Geosystems has offered both electromagnetic and ground penetrating radar hardware and software for detecting and mapping underground utilities. At HxGN Live this year one of the exciting technology highlights was the Pegasus: Stream, which combines a Leica Pegasus: Two mobile mapping device incorporating laser scanners, optical cameras and GNSS receivers and an IDS Stream EM ground penetrating radar (GPR) array. I first saw this towable combined above and below surface scanner at Geo Business in London. According to Stuart Woods, Leica Geosystems Vice-President of Mobile Mapping, Hexagon has worked with IDS for years and is in the process of acquiring IDS' GeoRadar division, which developed and manufactures the Stream array among other radar technology. This advance in technology puts Hexagon in the forefront of underground utility detection and mapping.

Indoor mapping

The other major hardware highlight of this year's HxGN LIve was the Pegasus Backpack. This is a wearable reality capture platform that collects data indoors, outdoors and underground. Klaas de Weerd, COO of Prisma Van Steenis, Prisma Groep, reported the experience that his team in mapping structures in the Netherlands. Among other structures they mapped the Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam inside and out. Leica mobile, P20 and P40 scanners were used outside, and the Backpack was used inside and on the roof.

Slope instability detection and monitoring

Enrico Boi, of the Georadar Division of IDS, reported on several applications using interferometric radar to detect slope deformation. Slope failures are complicated and hard to predict, which is the reason radar is important. For example, the I-70 through the Rockies is subject to rockfalls especially in the Glenwood Canyon in Colorado. IDS Interferometric Radar (IBIS) equipment was installed across the Canyon to identify the location of slope instabilities which then could then be stabilized to prevent rockfalls.

Laser scanning during construction

Fokke Broersma of Arcadis NL (Arcadis is also melding geospatial and BIM in construction.) reported on how his company, which is committed to using BIM throughout the construction life cycle, uses laser scanning in conjunction with BIM. One of the projects he described was the New Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam where laser scanning was used for capturing the existing structure prior to construction, then for as-builts after construction.

In a related software product Hexagon at HxGN announced the release of HxGN Smart Build. Smart Build is a cloud-based solution for large scale construction projects that integrates BIM models, point clouds, and as-built measurements to monitor construction progress and identify deviations from plan.

Opening electric network data

Adrienne Behan of ESB, an Irish energy company, described how her company manages its 2 million wood poles. Their GIS provides multiple views into a single network model which feeds into the outage management system. It also interfaces to other critical business systems. Any changes to the network are available to business users of the system within 24 hours. This is remarkable among utilities where backlogs often result in the network model being months even years out of date.

Mobile sensor platform robot

A highlight of President of Hexagon Safety and Infrastructure Steve Cost's keynote was a product of Hexagon SI's partnership with Gamma 2 Robotics. The robot that came on stage is a mobile sensor platform. One application of the product is a security patrol robot branded RAMSEE which can patrol autonomously providing real-time data on intruders, motion, heat, fire, smoke, gas and more.

UAVs

There were several UAVs on display at HxGN. The one I blogged about several years ago, about the time that Hexagon acquired the German company that had developed it, is the Aibotix. The Aibotix X6 has turned out to be a very stable platform capable of carrying a variety of sensors. It is used primarily for industrial inspection such as transmission pylons, dams, bridges, and other structures. It can hover, the camera or other sensor can be held below or above the frame, it can fly a path guided by GPS even in windy conditions and has fully automated takeoff and landing capabilities.

Historical building preservation Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo

One of the outstanding examples of using scanning technology to record and preserve information about historical buildings was presented by Italian company Technoart. The Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo, Sicily is an incredible structure with an intriguing multi-cultural history. The first building was built by the Arabs who occupied Sicily in the 9th,10th and 11th centuries. The Normans conquered Sicily in 1072 and made Palermo the capital of their kingdom. The Norman kings built upon the former Arabian palace. In 1132 Roger II, famous for sponsoring one of the earliest maps of the world based on Arab and Greek sources by Muhammad al-Idrisi (نزهة المشتاق في اختراق الآفاق‎‎,Tabula Rogeriana, Book of Roger), added the incredible Cappella Palatina. The laser and optical scan using a Pegasus One by Technoart resulted in a point cloud with optical imagery that with the aid of gaming software allows users to virtually walk through the palace and the Palatine Chapel and explore the structure including the gorgeous frescos in detail.

Background

Over the past 16 years, Hexagon has evolved from an auto parts and industrial measurement (metrology) hardware provider in Sweden to an international hardware and software solutions provider with annual revenue of € 3 billion and remarkably an operating margin of 23%. It operates in the agriculture, geospatial, geosystems, manufacturing intelligence (metrology), mining, positioning intelligence, process power and marine, and safety and infrastructure sectors. Among the many acquisitions it has acquired in the last decade are widely known Leica Geosystems (was Wild), Intergraph and Erdas. It has expanded from industrial metrology to include geospatial sensors including Leica total stations and laser scanners; and software-centric enterprise geospatial solutions. Its industrial enterprise solutions include industrial metrology hardware and software targeting optimizing manufacturing processes. It has acquired software for designing, constructing and operating industrial plants and offshore facilities.

May 02, 2016

In the future, the deliverables at the end of a construction project will not only include the completed building itself, but also a digital "reality model" of the structure. The digital model will include digital as-builts comprised of georeferenced point clouds captured by laser-scanning or meshes generated from images captured with a digital camera on a smartphone. That was the prediction of Bhupinder Singh of Bentley at the GeoBuiz 2016 Summit in Bethesda. This is a vision that is shared by other professionals in the construction industry including Ron Singh, Chief Surveyor at the Oregon Department of Transportation, who sees it as dramatically changing the construction process from surveying through design and construction to operations and maintenance.

Consumer devices and professionals

Consumer mobile devices will increasingly be the platform for many professional activities which currently require specialized devices and a PC computing platform. Bryn Fosburgh of Trimble pointed out that while currently the location accuracy of GPS equipped smartphones is 10 meters, centimeter precision is surely coming because all that is required is a relatively simple antenna redesign. Bryn sees a continuum in these devices between consumer and professional applications. But while consumers tend to blindly accept whatever is available on their smartphones, professionals using these devices will have to be aware of the limits of the hardware, what it can be used for and what not. For example, while smartphones in the future will be capable of centimeter accuracy in ideal locations, the accuracy will be less where there is a lot of scatter in the RF signals from the GPS satellites. To ensure reliable results a professional surveyor relies on multiple sources including GPS linked to an earth station and traditional total station measurements. Increasingly we will require other professionals to be involved. Bryn reported a rising demand for photogrammetrists, as a result of the growing volume and availability of high resolution imagery which needs professional to help interpret.

Platform as a service

For virtually all of the world's big IT companies including IBM, Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft and the world's big content companies such as Digital Globe, the cloud is central to their vision of the future. Together with others in the IT industry Xavier Lopez of Oracle sees the future in platform as a services (PaaS), but there are challenges. A major challenge is integrating data in different databases including traditional SQL databases from Oracle and Microsoft and nonSQL databases such as Hadoop. Another challenge is semantics. Frequently different disciplines use different terms for the same thing. I have blogged about the CB-NL project in the Netherlands aimed at solving the semantics problem in the construction industry. Another big issue that Xavier identified is data fusion without co-location - how do you enable efficient processing of a logically federated database when the data resides in different locations ?

Monetizing the cloud

But perhaps the biggest challenge is finding an appropriate business model. It is not completely transparent how the cloud is going to be successfully monetized, though the trend is toward some form of subscription or pay-per-use. An interesting model of the successful application of the cloud in the construction industry is Textura, just acquired by Oracle. Textura’s cloud serves as a place in which all of the participants in a project from the funding, through design, to construction can come together and access the shared assets necessary to complete the project. Textura’s network includes about 85,000 general and subcontractors who using Textura to collaborate on construction projects. Textura handles on average about 6,000 projects each month. The company’s shared database, which hosts project budgets, contractors, invoices, payments, change orders and compliance documents, resides in the cloud and is accessible to contract administrators, contractors, developers, subcontractors, consultants, title companies, and banks.

Big data and analytics

One of big drivers for the cloud is enabling the extraction of information from the huge volumes of data (most of which includes location) which are now available. I have blogged about the nearly 100 petabytes of earth observation imagery available from Digital Globe. According to Dr Richard W. Spinrad, Chief Scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) , NOAA is expecting to have 160 petabytes of archived geospatial data by 2020.

As another example, Jeff Jonas of IBM described a publicly available database which includes 600 billion transactions per day collected by telephone companies. This data, which includes location, can be mined (after being anonymized) for very interesting and commercially valuable information. Jeff Jonas described some examples - using it to analyze where people spend most of their time (their "pattern of life"), how many people go into a store, and how long they remain in a store.

Dipanshu Sharma, Founder & CEO, xAd illustrated live some of the things his company, which is in the location-based marketing business, does with this type of data. xAd can customize ads to target people who are inside a store ("There's a great deal on aisle 5"), just outside one ("Come on in, we have great deals on umbrellas") or close to a competitor's store ("Checkout XXXX, our prices are lower than YYYY") - the words are mine.

In all of these example, geospatial data and technology are key to the applications. Jeff Jonas foresees that the apps of the future on your smartphone will require geolocation and will be so compelling that just about everyone will enable GPS location on their smartphones.

April 14, 2016

I have just experienced two remarkable days at the Spar 3D Expo and Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, in itself a remarkable location near Houston. I will blog in more detail in the near future about the things and people I had the opportunity to experience over the past two days.

First of all, virtual reality. Everyone is aware of the Oculus Rift (see the new review at CNET if you aren't). There are other technologies that have come or are coming from Samsung, Sony and Google. But at SPAR 3D the most remarkable VR technology I personally experienced was what David Smith, CTO of Wearaility, talked about and allowed me and others to try - a set of incredibly light-weight glasses with acrylic lenses designed to work with a smartphone that gives you a virtual experience comparable to IMAX without the IMAX theatre. I tried it and found it an absolutely amazing surround experience. And if you have wondered where Michael Jones, of Keyhole and Google Maps fame, has landed, he is now CEO of Wearality.

Secondly, my personal passion is the geolocation of underground utilities. At SPAR 3D Mark Klusza, Founder & CTO, Real-time Metrology, Inc. described a major new advance in ground penetrating radar (GPR) technology he has developed that can detect a 3/4 inch rebar (among other things) four feet below the surface in clay.

For existing buildings creating a BIM model remains an art rather than science. But at SPAR 3D a number of new technologies were presented that can help automate, improve the quality, and speed the process. Foremost among them in my mind was presented by Nicolas Arnold, VP of Product Development, at SKUR. With SKUR's technology, which runs in the cloud, you can compare the 3D model that you have developed with the point cloud you derived the model from and identify all the points of significant variance. The same technology can also be used during a construction project to compare what has been built to what was designed - even when the building is only partially completed.

Ron Singh, Engineering Automation Manager/Chief of Surveys, Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) described progress on his remarkable vision of how automation is upending how we design, build and monitor, operate and maintain U.S. highway systems. Richard Arrowsmith, Asset Information Group Team Leader, Highways England described the digital model of the English highway system. Stan Burns, President, Integrated Inventory, who has just retired from Utah DoT, described Utah DoT's comprehensive database of every piece of highway furniture and signage in the Utah highway system. Together these represent the future of the digitalization of national highway systems.

A new company, Indoor Reality, is the third startup of Dr Avideh Zakhor, who is on leave from the University of California Berkeley. Her new device is a backpack loaded with sensors including lasers and infrared that enables you to map the interior of buildings by simply walking through a multi-floor building, including up and down stairs. The resulting data can be used to automatically generate floor plans and 3D models and captures everything you need for an Energy Plus analysis.

Mark Shell and Darrell Gadberry, both of the City of Fort Worth Water Department, described a very versatile device with laser and sonar and camera devices on board that can be used for sewer line inspections of small and large diameter sewer pipes. Fundamentally this device enables condition-based maintenance of municipal sewer systems. Mark and Darrell reported that it has saved the Fort Worth Water Department $42 million.

I was able to interview Dr Avideh Zakhor, Nicolas Arnold, Ron Singh, Larry Kleinkemper of Lanmar Services who specialize in creating BIM models for existing buildings, and Greg Bentley of Bentley who has a broad, forward-looking perspective on the "digitalization" of infrastructure.

August 14, 2015

I spent a couple of of very worthwhile days in Washington DC this week attending GeoBuiz Summit. A top highlight of the sessions was the presentation by Greg Turetzky, Principal Engineer in the GNSS and Location Strategy group at Intel. Greg described a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices that includes in-chip support for indoor location positioning.

Indoor mapping is already supported by Google and Bing. Micello is in the business of creating indoor maps of major venues around the world. Most of the activity seems to be focussed on consumers and locations such as malls, airports and department stores. A typical indoor application would lead you directly to particular products in a mall or department store.

The major problem that distinguishes indoor from outdoor location and mapping is that there is no widely recognized indoor equivalent of GPS. When you are outside of buildings on most of the Earth's surface you can use GPS or other GNSS systems to determine where you, other people and things are. But as soon as you walk into a building, GPS no longer works. Tracking people and objects in a building has been one of the major challenges facing the geospatial industry.

There have been many attempts to solve this problem. Tracking cell phone location using RFID, accelerometers, or installing transmitters with low frequency radio frequency waves that are not as affected by walls as high frequency waves. The prevalence of WiFi has made possible using Wifi signals from transmitters with known locations to triangulate location.

The business benefit of indoor location is significant because it increases the value of your assets - when you can locate equipment and facilities easily, you will use them more. In the case of hospitals it can be a matter of life and death to find the "crash cart" in seconds rather than minutes.

The Open Geospatial Consortium's IndoorGML Standards Working Group has released an IndoorGML Encoding Standard. IndoorGML has been developed to provide a schema framework for interoperability between indoor spatial applications such as indoor location services, indoor web map services, indoor emergency control, guiding services for visually handicapped persons in indoor space, and indoor robotics. The IndoorGML standard specifies an open data model and XML schema for indoor spatial information. IndoorGML is an application schema of OGC GML and intentionally focuses on modelling indoor spaces for navigation purposes.

Intel's 8270 chipset, which is based on the 802.11mc standard, is able to provide 2-3 meter accuracy 90% of the time. Intel's indoor location technology relies on fine time measurement (FTM) which measures the distance between a handheld device and 802.11mc-compliant Wi-Fi access points. Multilateration is used to compute the device's location.

The chipset is available. There is a video of the chipset in use. Intel is encouraging geospatial developers to create mobile apps using the chipset.

January 19, 2015

For the first time in a hundred years, the electric power utility industry is undergoing a momentous change. Distributed renewable power generation, especially solar photovoltaics (PV), is introducing competition into an industry that has been managed as regulated monopolies. Consumers with solar PV panels on their roofs are fundamentally changing the traditional utility business model. A recent report from the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) report refers to disruptive challenges that threaten to force electric power utilities to change or adapt the business model that has been in place since the first half of the 20th century.

Most utilities are in the midst of deploying smart grids, which basically amounts to applying the internet to the electric power grid to link intelligent electronic devices, sensors and grid control applications to enable data-driven decision making. One of the most important changes driven by the implementation of smart grid is the much greater importance of location. Geospatial technology (location, geospatial data management and spatial analytics) is seen as foundational techology for the smart grid.

The other major global change in energy is the shift in energy demand from the world's advanced economies to emerging economies. Energy demand from OECD countries has hit a plateau. Currently China is driving world energy demand. The International Energy Agency's (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2014 projects that in the future as demand slows from China, world energy demand will be driven by India, the Middle East, and Africa and Latin America.

Recently IDC Energy Insights released a report IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Utilities 2015 Predictions with predictions for the future of the utility business. Some of these are startling, suggesting that the utility industry is going to experience fundamental changes in how they do business over the next few years.

New business models

IDC predicts that utilities will be looking less at generation as a source of revenue. IDC predicts that by 2018 45% of new data traffic in utilities' control systems will originate from distributed energy resources that are not owned by the utility.

To make up for this loss of generation revenue IDC predicts that utilities will be looking for new business opportunities such as services. Specifically, IDC predicts that utilities will derive at least 40% of their earnings from new business models by 2017.

Technology

Cloud - By 2018 cloud services will make up half of the IT portfolio for over 60% of utilities.

Integration - In 2015 utilities will invest over a quarter of their IT budgets on integrating new technologies with legacy enterprise systems.

Analytics - By 2017 45% of utilities' new investment in analytics will be used in operations and maintenance of plant and network infrastructure.

Mobility - 60% of utilities will focus on transitioning enterprise mobility to capitalize on the consumer mobility wave.

Some of the important drivers for these trends include the global redistribution of energy demand from the world's advanced to the emerging economies, the rapid emergence of cloud-based provisioning and services, increasing regulatory pressure responding to customer demand to improve energy market transparency and competitiveness, cross-industry competition for technical, especially IT skills, smart analytics, and virtual and augmented reality beginning to be applied in business.

Top 10 technology trends

In March 2014 Gartner, Inc. identified the top ten technology trends which it saw impacting the global energy and utility markets. There is considerable overlap between IDC's business predictions and the technology trends identified by Gartner, Inc.

Social Media

Social media are beginning to be used as a customer acquisition and retention medium, as a consumer engagement channel to drive customer participation in energy efficiency programs, a source of information about outages, and as the emerging area of crowd-sourcing distributed energy resources coordination. Social media are also being used by utilities for communicating information about outages with customers.

Big Data

Smart grid will increase the quantity of data that utilities have to manage by a factor of about 10,000 according to a recent estimate. This trend is driven by intelligent devices, sensors, social networks, and new IT and OT applications such as advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), synchrophasors, smart appliances, microgrids, advanced distribution management, remote asset monitoring, and self-healing networks. The type of data that utilities will need to manage will change: for example, real-time data from sensors and intelligent devices including smart phones and unstructured data from social networks will play a much greater role for utilities in the future.

Mobile and Location-Aware Technology

Mobile and location-aware technology which includes hardware (laptops and smartphones), communication products (GPS-based navigation, routing and tracking technologies), social networks (Twitter,Facebook and others) and services (WiFi, satellites, and packet switched networks) are transforming all industries. Utilities for the most part have been slow to adopt consumer mobile technology, but this is changing.

Cloud Computing

Acccording to Gartner, areas such as smart meter, big data analytics, demand response coordination and GIS are driving utilities to adopt cloud-based solutions. Early adopters of cloud technologies include small utilities with limited in-house IT skills and budgets, organizations which provide application and data services to multiple utilities, such as cooperative associations and transmission system operators, and investor-owned utilities (IoUs) conducting short-term smart grid pilots.

Sensor Technology

Sensors, which are being applied extensively throughout the entire supply, transmission and distribution domains of utilities, provide a stream of real-time information from which a real-time state of the grid can be derived.

IT and OT Convergence

Virtually all new technology projects in utilities will require a combination of IT and OT investment and planning, such as AMI or advanced distribution management systems (ADMSs). This will be a challenge for many utilities, especially smaller ones, which don't have in-house IT skills.

Sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects are linked through wired and wireless networks, using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet. When intelligent objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding utility grids and responding to changes in near real-time. Following McKinsey there are two key benefits arising from the Internet of Things for utilities

Traditional asset management approaches are too limiting for today’s performance-based, data-driven utility environment. Asset performance management solutions need to deliver real-time equipment performance, reliability, maintenance and decision support for effective resource management so that operations and maintenance teams are empowered with real-time decision support information, providing the right information to the right people at the right time and in the right context. The result is improved operational performance and better asset availability and utilization.

Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics

Analytics will become essential as the volume of data generated by intelligent devices and sensors, mobile devices (the Internet of Things) and social media increases and huge pools of structured and unstructured data need to be analyzed to extract actionable information. Analytics will become embedded everywhere, often invisibly.

January 12, 2015

In general the operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for commercial purposes is illegal in the U.S. But in the last few months the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has issues grants of exemption to six companies for commercial UAVs for general aerial surveys (Trimble, Woolpert) and specifically for construction monitoring (Clayco, Inc), agriculture (Advanced Aviation Solutions), on and offshore oil and gas inspections (VDOS Global), and real estate (Douglas Trudeau, Realtor).

In 2011 the FAA fined a UAV operator $10,000 for flying a radio-controlled airplane recklessly over the University of Virginia campus to make a commercial for the University. Early in 2014 a National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Judge ruled that the FAA ban on flying UAVs was not legally binding. The judge said that the FAA had historically exempted model aircraft from the statutory definitions of aircraft. March 7 the FAA issued a notice saying that it was appealing the decision to the full National Transportation Safety Board. The FAA cited its regulation of model aircraft under the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 (FMRA) which states that “if a model aircraft operator endangers the safety of the National Airspace System, the FAA has the authority to take enforcement action against those operators for those safety violations.” November 18 the NTSB supported the FAA saying that an unmanned aircraft is subject to enforcement of FAA regulations prohibiting reckless operation of aircraft.

The FAA has issued 14 grants of exemption for commercial operation of UAVs. The first was to a manufacturer of UAVs used in film production. The FAA found that a "grant of exemption is in the public interest. Therefore ... Astraeus Aerial is granted an exemption ... to the extent necessary to allow Astraeus to operate unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for the purpose of scripted, closed-set filming for the motion picture and television industry."

Flights must be operated at an altitude of no more than 400 feet above ground level (AGL).

The UA must be operated within visual line of sight (VLOS) of the pilot at all times.

All operations must utilize a visual observer (VO). The VO and the pilot must be able to communicate verbally at all times.

The pilot must possess at least a private pilot certificate and at least a current third-class medical certificate.

The pilot must have accumulated and logged a minimum of five hours operating the UAV.

The UAV may not be operated directly (within 500 ft) over any person, except authorized and consenting production personnel.

Each UAV operation must be completed within 30 minutes flight time or with 25% battery power remaining, whichever occurs first.

The operator must obtain an Air Traffic Organization (ATO) issued Certificate of Waiver or Authorization (COA) prior to any operations under this grant of exemption.

The UAV must remain clear and yield the right of way to all other manned operations and activities at all times (ultralight vehicles, parachute activities, parasailing activities, hang gliders, etc.).

UAV operations may not be conducted at night.

The UAV may not be operated by a pilot from a moving device or vehicle.

The UAV may not be operated less than 500 feet below or less than 2,000 feet horizontally from a cloud or when visibility is less than 3 statute miles.

This is certainly not going to allow the deployment of long range UAVs like the Silent Falcon with a daytime endurance estimated to be 5 to 12 hours depending on wing configuration, weather, and flight profile. Night-time endurance is estimated at 3 to 5 hours. For example, equipped with LiDAR this could be used for transmission line monitoring for vegetation management at a much lower cost than a manned helicopter.

December 10 the FAA issued grants of exemption to four additional companies;

Clayco, Inc. , a general contractor, to operate unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) for the purpose of aerial imaging to monitor and ensure safety of construction sites.

Trimble Navigation Ltd, a provider of advanced location-based solutions, to allow Trimble to operate the UX5 UAS for the special purpose of precision aerial surveys that consist of still photographs taken by an onboard camera.

VDOS Global, LLC, a provider of aerial inspection services to the on and off-shore oil & gas industry, to allow VDOS to operate unmanned aircraft systems for the purpose of flare stack inspections on 14 Shell Oil Gulf of Mexico production platforms with all platforms beyond 12 nautical miles of the coast of the United States.

Woolpert, Inc, a design, geospatial and infrastructure management firm, to allow Woolpert to operate the Altavian Nova Block III unmanned aircraft system for the special purpose of precision aerial surveys that consist of still photographs taken by an onboard camera.

January 09, 2015

At the SPAR International Conference in April 2014, Kirk Knorr from Burns & McDonnell and Gregory Lawes of point3D gave a presentation about their experience using a handheld scanner from DotProduct LLC , a relatively new startup. This is a professional device intended for engineers and others working in the construction industry. It is basically a 7" Android tablet with a compact near infrared structured light and rgb 3D imaging system. It weighs less than a kilogram and is accurate for engineering purposes at distances up to 3.3 meters. It costs thousands of dollars, much less than the tens of thousands of dollars for terrestrial laser scanners. Kirk Knorr and an engineer from Bechtel reported that he had been using the device on live construction projects for a year and in their view the DotProduct and similar handheld devices are going to revolutionize how we do construction. They foresaw this happening very soon, within a year.

Now a major metrology company FARO has announced the Freestyle3D Scanner, which is a high precision, handheld scanner which generates high-definition point clouds. It can be used to scan objects within a range of half a meter to 3 meters away with a resolution in 3D of better than 1.5mm with a image point density of up to 45,000 points/m² at 0.5m and up to 10,500 points/m² at 1m. The total scan volume can include up to 8.1m³. The device weighs less than a kilogram with dimensions 26cm x 31cm x 10.5cm. The scanner is attached to a Microsoft Surface Pro tablet for visualizing the point cloud as you scan.

Some of the applications of the scanner include architecture and interior design, restoration and 3D modelling, construction and facility management, and forensic applications including accident reconstruction.

December 29, 2014

For the first time in a hundred years, the electric power utility industry is undergoing a momentous change. Distributed renewable power generation, especially solar photovoltaics (PV), is introducing competition into an industry that has been managed as regulated monopolies. Consumers with solar PV panels on their roofs (and in not-too-distant future with Tesla batteries in the basement) and companies like Solar City (co-founded by Tesla co-founder Elon Musk) are fundamentally changing the traditional utility business model. A recent report from the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) report refers to disruptive challenges that threaten to force electric power utilities to change or adapt the business model that has been in place since the first half of the 20th century.

As a result, every aspect of the the electric power industry is changing. One of these changes involves the role that geospatial data and technology play in the electricity industry. In the past, geospatial has been a tactical tool — it was (and still is) used in a variety of applications — in outage management, asset management, mobile work- force management, energy density modelling, vegetation management, demand modelling, transmission line siting, substation siting and design, energy performance modelling of buildings, disaster management, and mapping renewable resources, to name just a few. However, with the changes that the industry is undergoing now, geospatial is poised to become a foundation technology for the smart grid.

The Energy Issue of Geospatial World Magazine explores the impact that this momentous change is having on the application of geospatial technology in the electric power utility sector. Below I'm providing an overview of the material relating to electric power you'll find in this issue.

GIS has been widely used by utilities for years for automated mapping/facilities management, back office records management, asset management, transmission line siting, and more recently for design and construction, energy conservation, vegetation management, mobile workforce management (MWFM), and outage management (OMS). Now, utilities are integrating GIS with automated meter infrastructure (AMI) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. Intelligent design has crossed over from the office to the field in utilities, also enabled by the capabilities of GIS, says Smith. Geospatial-related analytics (spatial analytics) is seen as one of the key aspects of success for electric utility operations in the smart grid era. Looking for patterns and correlations between different land, weather, terrain, assets, and other types of geodata will be increasingly important for utilities. Power-related analytics with geospatial components include network fault tracing, load flow analysis, Volt/VAR analysis, real-time disaster situational awareness, condition-based maintenance, and vegetation management. The smart grid is all about situation awareness and effective anticipation of and response to events that might disrupt the performance of the power grid. Since spatial data underlies everything an electric utility does, GIS is the only foundational view that can potentially link every operational activity of an electric utility, including design and construction, asset management, workforce management, and outage management as well as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distribution management systems (DMSs), renewables, and strategy planning.

Peter Batty reports on the major growth in geospatially-enabled Web and mobile applications with a special focus on the open source geospatial community and the significant impact of these technologies in the utility sector. "In general, there are a lot of geospatial open source software components available now that have the capabilities and robustness to be used in serious enterprise applications." John McDonald, Chairman of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel has been a firm believer for a long time that geospatial information is part of the foundational platform for smart grid. SGIP has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Open Geospatial Consortium with the goal of incorporating more geospatial standards into SGIP standards. Cindi Smith of Bentley goes even further and argues that “geospatial technology is already a foundational component of electric power utilities’ IT/OT systems. Smart grid simply brings more focus to the role it can play by virtue of the visibility of smart grid projects and processes in a utility and their need to exploit the vast amounts of data produced by the smart grid." Loek Bakker & Jan van GelderIt of Alliander, a Dutch utility company, describe how essential it has been for Alliander to integrate GIS, ERP and SCADA systems for a correct picture of its assets. As electric utilities evolve into increasingly data-driven organisations, Jeffrey Pires and G. Ben Binger describe how GIS is fast emerging as the backbone for data management platforms.

Cities are beginning to develop 3D models of underground infrastructure motivated by new underground remote-sensing technologies and by ROIs of up to of US$21.00 saved for every US$1.00 spent on improving the quality level of subsurface utility information. Steve Dibenedetto, Senior Geoscientist and Technology Manager, Underground Imaging Technologies (UIT), part of Caterpillar describes new remote-sensing technology for detecting and geolocating in 3D underground utility infrastructure such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Electromagnetic Induction (EMI).

The Indian on-going Restructured – Accelerated Power Development and Reforms Program (R-APDRP) is one of the largest IT initiatives by electric utilities anywhere in the world — in one integrated project, all state-owned distribution utilities in India are building IT infrastructure, IT applications and automation systems. The programme set out to create baseline data in the form of consumer indexing, GIS mapping and asset mapping. Reji Pillai & C. Amritha assess how GIS can be applied in this context.

Integrating geospatial and BIM is a key enabler for energy performance modeling which is a fundamental instrument for reducing the energy consumption and improving the energy performance of new and existing buildings. According to a report from Navigant Research, global zero energy buildings revenue is expected to grow from $629.3 million in 2014 to $1.4 trillion by 2035.

Wolfgang Eyrich of Entegra shares how Entegra’s primtech product, which is designed to help substation designers deliver designs based on integrated product modelling, provides a geographical context to substation designing.

Matt Zimmerman of Schneider Electric highlights one of Schneider Electric's key techologies "graphic work design" which is integrated geospatial and engineering design (CAD or BIM). Schneider Electric's geospatial division focuses on developing integrated, location-aware enterprise solutions such as integrated outage management (OMS), customer information system (CIS), GIS, and external weather reporting and forecasting service to help plan crew deployment during a storm. Matt foresees that location-aware predictive analytics for electric networks is going to be one of the major development areas for utilities in the future. Brad Williams of Oracle points out that spatial analytics is becoming a key technology for electric utilities because everything a utility does - customers, assets, and operations - involves location.

One of the biggest challenges that utilities are experiencing is increasing volumes of structured and unstructured data (big data) that is overwhelming traditional enterprise systems. The structured data comes from smart meters and intelligent electronic devices, and the unstructured data from social networks including Twitter, Google, Facebook and other social applications. Consumerization of geospatial technology (we are all GPS-enabled sensors) will enable crowd-sourcing new sources of information about electric power networks most of which involves location (big spatial data).

October 15, 2014

At Oracle Open World in San Francisco 2014, September 28–October 2 the Oracle Spatial and Graph SIG held a Meetup. By way of background Oracle Spatial and Graph support geospatial data and analytics for land management and GIS, mobile location services, sales territory management, transportation, LiDAR analysis and location-enabled Business Intelligence. The graph features include RDF graphs for applications ranging from semantic data integration to social network analysis to linked open data and network graphs used in transportation, utilities, energy and telcos and drive-time analysis for sales and marketing applications.

There were several very interesting discussions at the Meetup that revealed some interesting aspects of Oracle Spatial itselef and its interoperability with other products such as ESRI ArcGIS, Autodesk Map3D, and Bentley. These are taken from a summary recorded by Nick Salem moderator of the Meetup.

The Meetup was attended by about 20 users came from industries such as rail, local city government, national land management agencies, and defense. The SIG Board and members of the Oracle Spatial product development team joined up with them in the Oracle Technology Network Lounge.

Some of the most interesting discussion topics include new features in Oracle Spatial 12c and real world experience interoperating Oracle Spatial with CAD and GIS products from other vendors.

A new Oracle Spatial 12c SDO_POINTINPOLYGON function can be used to ingest large point datasets (point clouds) without the overhead of creating a spatial index.

Bechtel has developed a way to use ESRI ArcGIS versioning with Oracle Workspace Manager (OWM). They have developed in-house custom tools to usefeature-level metadata to be able to retrieve spatial content from their project and public spatial databases, as well as to compile the revision history of layers in the database to retrieve maps impacted by changes to individual features.

Dan Geringer, Oracle Spatial Solutions Architect, advised that other large enterprises have also successfully implemented OWM with ESRI ArcGIS.

Bulk processing and interoperability are two of the important advantages of Oracle Spatial for enterprises. Bechtel has large project-based deployments of Autodesk and Bentley CAD systems, and has worked with Autodesk in recent years to successfully write spatial data to their Enterprise GIS Oracle Spatial database from Autodesk Map 3D. They also have developed a GIS Desktop Procedure that details the required Autodesk client software configuration for Oracle Spatial and ESRI ArcSDE database connections. They will be updating it for use with Autodesk 2014 and 2015 clients.

Latest version of MapViewer (11.1.1.7) supports HTML5 and JSon and the ability to work in disconnected mode. Standalone, web-based vector editing is also available. Wish Li and Jayant Sharma demonstrated MapViewer on mobile devices, an Android phone and an iPad.